Live data from Hacker News

Untitled topic

news.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 382 posts

Re: undefined

#192
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly like the man in the article. People are trying to make this into some political, partisan fight, which causes people’s trust in experts to be eroded. There’s a whole story about this called the boy who cried wolf.

The President's whole brand is that he knows more than the experts. I'm listening to him right now, live, saying 'the doctors re telling us we have to shut down the whole world, they want to shut it down for years, but you can't let the cure be worse than the problem.' He's talking complete nonsense about quarantine and how bad it is to close the stock exchange while saying the quarantine is a bigger problem than the…

Hard to understand your point. It seems quite obvious to me that you can't shut down the world economy for any length of time without introducing enormous amounts of collateral damage (i.e. deaths).

What is nonsense about that?

Re: undefined

#193
post #2

The repeated recommendation to use a drug which has not been properly tested by the president of the most powerful nation on this planet seems inappropriate to me.

They didn't take the drug, they took an aquarium cleaner... http://bannerhealth.mediaroom.com/chloroquinephosphate >A man has died and his wife is under critical care after the couple, both in their 60s, ingested chloroquine phosphate, an additive commonly used at aquariums to clean fish tanks. Within thirty minutes of ingestion, the couple experienced immediate effects requiring admittance to a nearby Banner Health…

----------------------------------------

BREAKING NEWS: CHLOROQUINE CURES CORONAVIRUS BUT DOES NOT CURE STUPIDITY.

---------------------------------------

Re: undefined

#194
post #2

The repeated recommendation to use a drug which has not been properly tested by the president of the most powerful nation on this planet seems inappropriate to me.

True thing. Also people who I like like Elon Musk spoke about it https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239650597906898947?s=20 On one side his voice should be heard, it may give people hope and help to move stuff On the other side, some people who don't know what balance is, might use it in the wrong way.

I can't understand why he's tweeting this as if the CDC and doctors and so on aren't already considering those drugs as a treatment option. Many of the responses to the tweet have a tin-foil-hat kinda feel to them. Who exactly do they think is suppressing usage of these drugs? And why?

Re: undefined

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

President talks about the preliminary reports that HCQ is working for treating COVID-19 around the world. It might be a good treatment here. People freak out. "Preliminary doesn't mean proven!" Man self-medicates with HCQ and dies. President's fault??

Yes, I think so. People grew up to trust institutions, and for decades they had good reason to (at least in the subjects of public health and safety). Who's to blame when after decades -- no, centuries -- we elect a leader who makes false claims that are counter to medical science -- and potentially hazardous, if followed, to the public health? The victim, or the authority? I know which party I blame.

The man who died drank aquarium cleaner. It is a huge stretch to blame that on Trump.

Re: undefined

#196
I saw this paper [1] on Twitter today. At number 5 in the list of top-scoring chemicals that disrupt the virus's behaviour (PDF p11) is quercetin, which is apparently found in capers [2] and readily cleared for use as a supplement. While no one should be self-medicating with this sort of thing unless they know exactly what they're doing, it seems to me like this sort of chemical could show promise as a therapeutic treatment prescribed by medical professionals while we wait for a vaccine (I am NOT an expert, assess the reliability of the literature, caveat emptor, etc.).

[1] https://chemrxiv.org/articles/Repurposing_Therapeutics_for_t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercetin

Re: undefined

#197

I wasn't able to find a reliable source on short notice, but the ones I found indicate a therapeutic index of around 4-8 for chloroquine. The therapeutic index is the ratio between the dose that is effective and the lethal dose. So in this case if you take 4-8 times the dose that actually works you're in the range where it could kill you. I'd be really interested in more robust sources on this. But from the bits I've…

For hydroxychloroquine, Wikipedia has the following summary, with citation (and figures confirmed in the abstract):

> The therapeutic, toxic and lethal ranges are usually considered to be 0.03 to 15 mg/l, 3.0 to 26 mg/l and 20 to 104 mg/l, respectively. However, nontoxic cases have been reported up to 39 mg/l, suggesting individual tolerance to this agent may be more variable than previously recognised.

For chloroquine, it just says it is "known to be small" (with citation, though I can't see the full PDF to see what "small" means).

Re: undefined

#198
post #24
post #2

The repeated recommendation to use a drug which has not been properly tested by the president of the most powerful nation on this planet seems inappropriate to me.

I'm inclined to argue about the title "most powerful nation on this planet". It's a nice tagline, but the metrics for which it applies are narrowing rapidly. But still, let this be a lesson to those who would follow bad leaders to their own demise; or rather, let it be a lesson to their offspring who watch them follow the bad leaders. I suspect humanity follows cycles of enlightenment, complacency, and self-destructi…

> But still, let this be a lesson to those who would follow bad leaders to their own demise; or rather, let it be a lesson to their offspring who watch them follow the bad leaders.

a.k.a 90% of the population. At such point, you're just complaining about human stupidity, instead of any specific group. And our children will be just as stupid as us, but their leader will say dumb things about other issues instead of chloroquine.

Re: undefined

#199
post #2

The repeated recommendation to use a drug which has not been properly tested by the president of the most powerful nation on this planet seems inappropriate to me.

I think it's a stretch to pin this particular death on Trump. He never suggested or advised people self-medicate prescription drugs. This was just a scared uneducated couple that made a terrible mistake.

Agreed.

Also, this wasn't even somebody taking too much of a prescribed drug. The man who died drank aquarium cleaner.

Post reply on HN